When Janet Met DAVID
The Australian Magazine, April 9 - 10, 1994
As a young schoolgirl she yearned for him, the television idol, man of her pre-teen dreams. And she went on wondering, if not yearning, for 20 years. Then came the day when Janet Fife-Yeomans finally got to meet David Cassidy.
It is Friday morning in an ice-locked New York City. The airports are closed, the train lines have frozen solid and the mayor is on television getting everyone to remain indoors. Even most of the toughened yellow cab drivers have thought better of battling the Manhattan snowdrifts and stayed home. But blizzard blanketing the streets is no match for me. I have waited 23 years to come this far and no mere history-making snowstorm can keep me from my goal. I don't feel the cold and I swear that when I reach my destination, my feet aren't even wet.
At the canopied apartment block I announced myself to the doorman and he sends me up to heaven in a lift. But by the time I reach out to knock on the door to the apartment at the end of the passage, my courage is slipping away faster than teen idols can disappear without trace.
What do you say to someone you have never met but whose most personal details, including his inside leg measurement (31 ins), hospital where he was born (Flower Fifth Avenue Hospital, New York City) and even the name of the doctor who delivered him (Dr A Kinsey) are still burned uselessly into your memory? Someone who for at least seven years gazed at you from bedroom walls, ceiling and yes, this is getting terribly embarrassing but I'm not ashamed, curtains and pillowcases. The person responsible for your rare collection of carpet fluff from the stately homes and hotels of the world when the nearest you could get to him was to write schoolgirl letters asking the lords and ladies or hotel managers for something he had walked on?
"Hello", that's what you say. David Cassidy opens his apartment door, holds out his right hand as in his left he holds is two-year-old son, Beau, and says; "Hi Janet, how are you. Come in." I shake his hand, mouth "Hello", so hopefully some sound comes out and follow him inside. It's all quite simple really. I'm no longer the 11-year-old schoolgirl and he's no longer the 20-year-old whose breathless voice I used to go to sleep with as he sang those, well, classics of their genre, I Think I Love You andCherish.
We're adults. We're going to sit down and have a professional interview between a journalist and a 43-year-old actor-cum-musician who is starring in a Broadway role to critical acclaim. Oh yeah! Who am I kidding? This is the man responsible for a million of my dreams and finally here he is, out of my dreams and standing next to me in the kitchen of a Manhattan apartment with yellow pastel-striped walls where he's asking if I want a cup of tea.
This was a meeting I had spent those 23 years since the age of 11 wishing for. It was a sobering thought to realise it had been most of my life. More sobering were the doubts since he had agreed to the interview. Was I about to come face to face with a man or a myth? What if I didn't like him? I was afraid to make the magic disappear. I rationalised that even if it turned out he hadn't been worth it, the dream certainly had been.
Picture a mining town in the north-east of England with rows of blackened terraces, some still with outside toilets across lanes of concrete. Their flowery names, stolen perversely from Shakespeare, such as Portia Street and Juliet Crescent, merely reaffirmed their grimy bleakness. A family friend summed it up with a tale about the time he saw Ashington again after returning home from a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp and wanted to turn around and go straight back.
My family lived in a village just outside town in relative luxury with gardens and inside toilets, but it was Ashington where I got my education, where most of the boys left school to become miners and most of the girls became hairdressers or pregnant. You needed a dream to get you through that growing-up, a dream to give you the impetus to escape, David Cassidy was mine.
I noticed him first in an episode of Marcus Welby MD, but it was the moment he reappeared as Keith Partridge in The Partridge Family that the backdrop to my teenage years was set. There he was, pictured on a beach in Hawaii, or outside his Spanish-style home in the San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles ... always he was smiling, always he was having fun. It was his lifestyle I fell into infatuation with as much as the man. In Ashington we were near beautiful beaches, sure, ringed as they were with sea coal collected by the sackful by the unemployed, but the sun rarely shone and when it did, it only reminded me what a good time David Cassidy and his friends were having.
I became the answer to the prayers of every marketing man. Yes, I bought everything that carried his picture, every record he made. Everything that brought him into my life in little ways. When there was a photograph of him wearing white clogs, I bought a pair. When I saw him wore a pinky ring (size 6), I asked for one for my birthday. I wore his name embroidered on my jeans and across the back of my jacket.
Unlike other seventies idols, Cassidy had credibility. He posed naked for Annie Leibowitz and even had a record, Get It Up For Love, banned. The New Musical Express asked him how many times he'd been laid. He didn't answer but I was impressed. You wouldn't have bothered to ask Donny Osmond that question.
My parents decided it as an obsession. I called it a hobby.
Now the kettle is boiling and he's asking how I take my tea. He can make it cold without a teabag and I won't notice. We're talking about the Sydney bushfires and the Los Angeles earthquake. He looks not a day older. With those hazel eyes and lopsided teeth, he could have stepped straight off my bedroom walls. Keith Partridge with short hair. Who would have believed it? Here he is in front of me making something as mundane as a cup of tea and I thought the closest I would ever get to him was his former sidekick, Danny Bonaduce.
When the little ginger-haired guitarist from The Partridge Family, who later sank into cocaine addiction and was charged with assaulting a transvestite prostitute, engineered a comeback as a radio host and toured Australia 18 months ago with his stand-up comedy show, I thought I was silly sidling up to him afterwards with my battered Partridge Family Sound Magazine album under my arm for him to autograph. But I wasn't alone, there were albums thrust up on stage from all quarters.
After years in the wilderness, this whole new world of sisters with memories as long as mine opened up for me. The fans are once again mobilising. There's a revitalised global network. Fan clubs in nine countries, including Australia, conventions organised by the London David Cassidy Friendship Society, official David Cassidy Christmas cards - it's just like the good old days.
David hands me the mug of tea and I can tell he thinks he's seen me somewhere. I did win a competition to meet him once but he cancelled. "You look like a girl I went out with when I was 19," he says. "I promise you. She played the mermaid on The Partridge Family." No, that's not it. I prompted his memory. The cover photograph of the Cassidy Live album, taken May 26, 1974, at London's White City Stadium. The girl in the middle of the sea of faces. His face registers something, recognition perhaps?
The tea mug has Nick at Nite written on it. Nicks is a US television show which has been re-running the old Partridge Family episodes to what can only be described as astonishing viewing figures. This nostalgia stuff is no mere cult, it has become serious stuff. Accompanied by the psychedelic Partridge Family bus, Cassidy last year did a whirlwind tour of the US. The Partridge Family albums are being re-released on CD and Cassidy is planning a US tour this northern summer - possibly followed by Australia and the rest of the world - sending up The Partridge Family and his days as a teenybop idol.
I'm going to do a huge satire of me, Search of The Partridge Family Bus. I'm going to take Danny Bonaduce with me, he's very funny. He's a wonderful guy. We're going to play big open air venues and do this fabulous celebration send-up of myself and the decade. I don't feel embarrassed any more because I believe The Partridge Family was the last gasp of innocence. But when I was 19 and I was making records for 13, 14, 15-year-olds and not just making records for them but this was the audience that all that merchandising was focusing on with lunchboxes and all that kind of stuff, well ...
"People perceived me as this superhuman sort of demigod. I wasn't. I was 19 and I was really only trying to pay the rent. It was a job. They p aid me $1000 to do the pilot show for The Partridge Family and it was one week that turned into a four-year life-changing career."
It changed my life just as profoundly. I chose journalism as my ticket out of the north of England and finally found my life of sunshine and beaches when I arrived in Australia 10 years ago - via Los Angeles and Hawaii, of course, where I went to search for Cassidy's homes. But while I followed my dream, life was not so kind during those years to the man who inspired it.
"I became the highest paid entertainer in the world for a couple of years. I mean Elvis was still alive and I was getting more money than he was but while all my friends were getting drunk and having orgies I was locked in a room somewhere with security guards around me. Seven days a week, 18 hours a day. It took its toll on me. I was emotionally crippled."
He retired from superstardom and married actress Kay Lenz in a Las Vegas wedding chapel in 1977, not long after I started my first job on my local newspaper. Three years later they divorced. Then he married Mary (Meryl) Tanz, a horse breeder, which inspired a fan I sat next to at one of Cassidy's comeback concerts in 1986 to go out and buy a horse - it rather put the white clogs and pinky ring I was wearing to shame. Cassidy and Tanz said goodbye, acrimoniously, in 1986.
Meanwhile, his father, actor Jack Cassidy, who had divorced David's mother and married his Partridge Family screen-mum Shirley Jones, died in a fire at his New York apartment. "It was difficult those years when I was successful because my dad was very jealous. It was so sad. We didn't have the chance to heal the wounds between us before he died. It was very painful."
His long-time manager, Ruth Aarons, was murdered by her lover. Cassidy lost all his money through incompetent management and no one in the entertainment business wanted to employ him because of who he had been. He was reduced to appearing at the opening of a car dealership for $1000 on condition the manager pretended he was there because he was an old friend.
The remaining members of The Partridge Family fared better. However, while Susan Dey (Laurie) won her credibility with LA Law Jeremy Gelbwaks (the first Chris) got into computers, Brian Forster (the second Chris) became a race car driver and instructor and Suzanne Crough (Tracy) bought a bookstore, still worse was to come for Cassidy. He posed for publicity shots with British topless Page 3 model Samantha Fox. Even I cringed.
Then followed five years of counselling. "I was unconscious, unconscious and unhappy. I'm a completely different person to what I was five years ago. Thank God I've always had a sense of humour so all the changes that have occurred in my life, all the pain and the distorted view people had of me, I have embraced now. The phenomena, I ended it, I ended it up here ..." he hits his head with his finger. "My attitude about my life has completely changed."
Enter his third wife, literally. Sue Shifrin, a singer and songwriter, walks into the apartment's lounge wrapped up in a ski suit, says she's pleased to see me (if only I'd got here a few years earlier...), smiles and heads out into the snow. They first met at the height of all the madness in 1973 backstage at one of his concerts at Wembley's Empire Pool. When they got back together a few years ago, she was the support he needed to resurrect his life and his career.
With a faultless Liverpool accent, he's playing to standing ovations (I wasn't the only one who rose to my feet) at the Music Box Theatre, off Broadway, in Willy Russell's biting play, Blood Brothers, with his brother Shaun Cassidy and Petula Clark.
And he's finished his autobiography, due out this year. "This is one of the last interviews I'm giving when I'm talking about The Partridge Family, it's all in the book," he says. "I loved it, it was fun, I had a family and I got to do things that people never get to do. I've lived an incredible life. I took it and destroyed it all and completely rebuilt it, my personal life and career. I'm talking about another guy, I feel like another guy."
The tea mugs are empty, my time is up. He shakes my hand: "It's been a pleasure and a delight," he says. There's no carpet fluff to lift for a souvenir - the floors are polished - so I settle for a cleaner taking a photograph of us.
Down in the street with my feet firmly back on the ground, I know I should be all grown up about this but I am so excited I feel like running around in circles. So I tell some poor tourist who stops to ask me the way to the nearest bank that I've just met David Cassidy. Far from being impressed, he tells me he's just seen Al Pacino walking through Central Park. I avoid a discussion about who was David Cassidy anyway and head off to the nearest record store where I look through the 'C's until I find his latest album, called didn't you used to be...
I think I have to reassure myself that the David Cassidy I have just met, the David Cassidy who was such an ordinary, nice man - with a family for goodness sake - was the very same person whose image wove such a web around me that it held on all these years. I'd stopped wanting to marry him when I was 15 and stopped lusting after him 10 years later. But up there alone with him for a time in his apartment building, I didn't even fancy him a teensy bit. He was more like an old friend, someone I felt very comfortable with.
While I'm pleased I met him as the mature, sensible adult I managed to appear to be and not as a tongue-tied teenage fan, I can't help wishing I could have experienced the thrill you can only get with innocence of youth. Actually, I wish I could have spent the morning just looking at him to make sure he was real instead of having to waste the entire time interviewing him.
It's still snowing and I find I'm humming Cherish. I've actually done it, I've met David Cassidy. The man was even better than the myth and thankfully there's still plenty of magic in the air. I run around in a circle and punch my arm up high - since when was being blasé any fun? And I'm lucky - I'm going home to my boyfriend, who happens too be called David. I know one poor David Cassidy fan who is jealous because she could only manage to marry a Simon ...
The Downunder David Cassidy Fansite thanks Janet Fife-Yeomans for the priviledge of putting up this article. Also thanks to Karen Findlater for scanning and sharing this article and contacting Janet for her approval to have this article posted on this site. Janet is presently the Deputy Editor of The Australian and appeared in ABC's 7.30 Report on David's Australian promotional tour interivew, September 16th, 2002. Janet also wrote 'Cassidy at 52 still thinks he Loves You', The Australian, September 18, 2002.
